Completing Manipulation Tasks Efficiently in Complex Environments

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Abstract

An effective autonomous robot performing dangerous or menial tasks will need to act under significant time and energy constraints. At task time, the amount of effort a robot spends planning its motion directly detracts from its total performance. Manipulation tasks, however, present challenges to efficient motion planning. Tightly coupled steps (e.g. choices of object grasps or placements) allow poor early decisions to render subsequent steps difficult, which this encourages longer planning horizons. However, an articulated robot situated within a geometrically complex and dynamic environment induces a high-dimensional configuration space in which it is expensive to test for valid paths. And since multi-step plans require paths in changing valid subsets of configuration space, it is difficult to reuse computation across steps. This thesis proposes an approach to motion planning well-suited to articulated robots performing recurring multi-step manipulation tasks in complex, semi-structured environments. The high cost of edge validation in roadmap methods motivates us to study a lazy approach to pathfinding on graphs which decouples constructing and searching the graph from validating its edges. This decoupling raises two immediate questions which we address:(a) how to allocate precious validation computation among the unevaluated edges on the graph, and (b) how to efficiently solve the resulting dynamic pathfinding problem which arises as edges are validated. We next consider the inherent tradeoff between planning and execution cost, and show that an objective based on utility functions is able to effectively balance these competing goals during lazy pathfinding. Lastly, we define the family motion planning problem which captures the structure of multi-step manipulation tasks, and propose a related utility function which allows our motion planner to quickly find efficient solutions for such tasks. We assemble our algorithms into an integrated manipulation planning system, and demonstrate its effectiveness on motion and manipulation tasks on several robotic platforms. We also provide open-source implementations of our algorithms for contemporary motion planning frameworks. While the motivation for this thesis originally derived from manipulation, our pathfinding algorithms are broadly applicable to problem domains in which edge validation is expensive. Furthermore, the underlying similarity between lazy and dynamic settings also renders our incremental algorithms applicable to conventional dynamic problems such as traffic routing.